Sunday, September 23, 2012

Misandry in Education – Introduction

Misandry is sexism against men and boys as a group, or against
individual men and boys based on their status as males. It can be expressed in
a myriad of ways. One way is by expressing hostility - either by direct
insults, or by implying that males are inherently unintelligent, unnecessary,
or dangerous. It is expressed by speaking of men and boys as if they deserve
our indifference, which has the effect of dehumanizing them and rendering them
more vulnerable to the slings and arrows of the world. It is expressed by
acting as if the well-being and vulnerabilities of women and girls are more
important than those of men and boys, or by enforcing one rule for men, and
another for women.

In education especially, misandry can be expressed by the
assertion that a particular action, idea, body of knowledge, perspective or
invention is illegitimate simply because it was created or performed by someone
with a Y-chromosome. When certain individuals act like or claim that there is a
dark side to male nature and a good side to female nature, while denying,
despite all the evidence to the contrary, that there is a dark side to female
nature and a good side to male nature by dismissing them as “just myths and
stereotypes,” they are in effect saying men are bad and women are good, which
is misandry. Misandry is the belief that the worst among males is
representative of men and boys in general, or “normative masculinity,” or “male
culture,” or whatever broad brush is used to tar men as a group.

I believe that suspending a 9-year-old boy for calling a teacher “cute,” or for singing “I’m sexy and I know it,” or for punishing boys – but not girls – who spank the bottoms of their classmates is also a product of
misandry. In this sense, almost everything that I will cover in The War on Male Students – from the neglect of their educational needs, to the presence of
anti-male hostility, to the systemic destruction of their civil rights - is a
product or byproduct of misandry. But what I will address in this particular
line of videos and blog posts titled “Misandry in Education” is not so much misandry in the
form of actions, but misandry as it appears in the spoken and written word. And
while it can be reasonably said that not all, or even most, faculty,
administrators, or even students express sexism against men and boys, it also
bears mention that they don’t have to. Prejudice and hatred for men and boys –
just as it is for any other group – does not have to be consistently
all-encompassing to create a hostile learning environment. All it has to be is
consistently unopposed.

Here, we will be unapologetically critical of the misandry of
Radical Feminism and its influence in education. Moderate Feminists are quick
to tell us that “not all Feminists are like that.” While that is certainly true
- and I do name the exceptions – it is not a justifiable reason in and of
itself to ignore or sweep under the carpet the sexism expressed by those who
are like that.

At first, the lack of opposition to misandry by faculty and
administrators may seem understandable. Decades ago, like the frog in the
boiling water, many of them could not even identify the problem. And also, most
of the misandry in academia is a politicized form of sexism, and political
disagreements are often best avoided.

But when prejudice develops from an attitude among a scattered few
to a connected subculture, when that subculture becomes entrenched, and when it
metastasizes to the point that it begins to eat away at the civil rights of
those it targets, remaining silent is no longer a virtue. As we will see, misandry
in education is not merely a collection of infrequent and disassociated
anomalies arising from individuals uninfluenced by supportive or acquiescent
peer groups. On the contrary, it is a culturally pervasive in education in a way
that cannot be reasonably characterized as incidental, coincidental, or even
accidental.

On a related note, there
are good-faith efforts springing up within academia to
help men and boys, particularly in terms of educational attainment. I created a video and blogged about one of them, which is Project MALES at UT Austin, which
hosted two symposia which I attended, at one of which I volunteered. While good
hearts and good minds are working in such groups, they do have limitations.
First, many such groups and initiatives (with few exceptions, one of them being
Project MALES) are isolated, poorly funded, and live only as long as they can
produce immediate results, or as long as the particular educator who champions
that particular cause remain employed at that facility, a phenomenon Richard
Whitmire documented in his book Why Boys
Fail.

Second, absolutely none of them as of right now, September 2012, are
addressing the destruction of the civil rights of male students, and none of
them are investigating and developing the means to combat the subculture of
misandry which contributes to a hostile learning environment for male students.
And while these groups do have their hands full with the issue of educational
attainment alone, the fact remains that we need a strong and networked voice in
education to stand up for men and boys who are denigrated by sexism or have
their civil rights violated, and currently no such voice in academia exists.

Furthermore, after reviewing the general culture and structure of
academia for some time, I am convinced that groups which focus on the
inequities in educational attainment for men and boys will never get enough
funding for operations on a large enough scale, nor will they ever get the
approval they need from the right people in the right places, nor will academia
ever engage the lion’s share of its networking and funding potential to helping
male students until the cultural barriers of misandry and careerism are
weakened or removed.

I want to point out that many feminists want to help and DO talk about this (though I am finding that many feminists are some of the most damaged people, while they really mean well, they have a lot of habits that they need to learn to overcome, many of them put men in boxes). The good men project talks about this a lot (on facebook and online).

I think it's good you want to talk about this stuff, and I am a feminist. After hearing from other feminists how horrible may MRAs are, I feel you are putting a good angle on things in this article. I haven't read the rest. But I assure you, other people are trying.

Those other people who are trying are mostly MHRAs, MHRA supporters, or at least boy advocates. I'd personally like to believe feminists much better at helping men and boys. However, when you have highly influential political pressure groups like the AAUW, the Wellesley Center, the Ms. Foundation and influential people in the U. S. Department of Education going around in the 90s talking about short-changed boys in education, with evidence to the contrary... a belief like feminists knowing what they're doing simply fails (see Christina Hoff Sommers The War Against Boys).

It's great to advocate for women and girls in STEM fields, but doing just that and ignoring that men and boys often lag in the humanities and liberal arts doesn't sound like an equitable program to me. When you have the AAUW spending hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting the idea of short-changed girls, and a member of the AAUW putting out a study with good evidence indicating short-changed boys instead, but the AAUW doing nothing even remotely comparable to promote that study, there exists a problem... how can it not come as a systematic problem? Since there exists a women's center on so many college campuses, and a dearth of men's centers and people saying things like "the men's center is everywhere else", we have a problem. Since we've had educators putting programs into schools basically trying to force-fed them never proven hypotheses (though potentially philosophically interesting) like "gender is a social construct" to students as if that were scientifically well-supported and portraying men and boys as proto-rapists and proto-batterers... well I hope you can start to see how we can end up angry and looking like misogynists. Oh... and that whole removal of due process (lowering to preponderance of the evidence) for *accused* rapists on college campuses even manages to screw the people who helped promote it http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324600704578405280211043510.html